Frank McCourt Quotes
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If I have a cause, it's the cause of the teacher.
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You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.
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Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.
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I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.
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Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for.
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I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'
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Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.
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When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.
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The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice.
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My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.
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I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.
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It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.
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I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.
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I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.
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They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them. … They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don’t care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them.
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Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.
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I can do no more than tell the truth.
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Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.